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My Journey of States-50  Oregon

10/9/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
My favorite books are a constantly changing list, but one favorite has remained constant: the dictionary. Is the word I want to use spelled practice or practise? The dictionary knows. The dictionary also slows down my writing because it is such interesting reading that I am distracted.
Beverly Cleary
Born April 12, 1916
In McMinnville, Oregon
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B. Cleary
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the fiftieth post of fifty.

Oregon (2015)

​Not only do I get to conclude my fifty-part series with the thoughts of one of my favorite childhood authors, Beverly Cleary, who lives at age 103, but with one of my favorite states. Ken and I arrived at our destination, Oceanside, in the middle of June, 2015. Our friends whom we met at Oceanside, had cautioned us about a sort of mix master coming through Portland, and we had studied digital maps galore, but we still managed to lose a lane and wind up for a few panicked seconds wondering where our car would go. It all worked out.
 
The four of us shared a lovely three-bedroom house on a steep hill. Luckily, it was sunny the entire time, yet the temps never rose above the mid-fifties. We were privileged to witness a double low-tide, in which more beach than usual was exposed, leaving a great deal of sea life visible until the tide returned. I captured a bit of that beauty in the photos above, also a few other sights we managed to take in along the coast. 
 
Oregon was the 33rd state to join the union in 1859 and celebrated its sesquicentennial in 2009.

Historical Postcards and Trunk Decals

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas                13. New Jersey     25. Michigan     37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma        14. Delaware         26. Wisconsin 38. Maine
3-Texas                   15. New York        27. Minnesota  39. Rhode Island
​4-Louisiana         16. Connecticut     28. Iowa               40. Idaho
5-Missouri           17. Colorado         29. Hawaii           41. Nevada
6-Illinois               18. Arkansas        30. Georgia         42. Utah
7-Indiana              19. California       31. S. Carolina   43. Washington
8-Ohio                   20. Florida             32. N. Carolina  44. Alaska
9-Pennsylvania    21. Mississippi    33. Alabama       45. Nebraska
10-West VA        22. New Mexico     34. Kentucky    46. S. Dakota
11-Maryland       23. Tennessee      35. Massachusetts 47. N. Dakota
12. Virginia          24. Arizona            36. Vermont      48. Montana
49. Wyoming    50. Oregon         
NEXT TIME: My Book World | Regina Porter's Novel The Travelers
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My Journey of States-48  Montana

9/11/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
The nature of love is that it catches you off-guard, subjects you to rules you have never faced, some of them contradictory.
--Ivan Doig
Born June 27, 1939
White Sulphur Springs, Montana
Died April 9, 2015
Seattle, Washington
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I. Doig
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the forty-eighth post of fifty.

Montana (2014, 2015)

​I first became acquainted with Montana when, as a child, I learned that a great uncle lived there, was superintendent of schools in Miles City for nearly thirty-five years—although I would never visit the state until many years later. In 2014, while visiting South Dakota, Ken and I made a day-trip to cross over into North Dakota and Montana. We returned to the state mid-June 2015, to enter Yellowstone National Park. A mistake tourist-wise—way too crowded—but still, we did attempt to enjoy its stark and majestic beauty. We hope to go back either in May or September one year.
 
Montana became the forty-first state on November 8, 1889.

Historical Postcards & Trunk Decals

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas                13. New Jersey     25. Michigan     37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma        14. Delaware         26. Wisconsin 38. Maine
3-Texas                   15. New York        27. Minnesota  39. Rhode Island
​4-Louisiana         16. Connecticut     28. Iowa               40. Idaho
5-Missouri           17. Colorado         29. Hawaii           41. Nevada
6-Illinois               18. Arkansas        30. Georgia         42. Utah
7-Indiana              19. California       31. S. Carolina   43. Washington
8-Ohio                   20. Florida             32. N. Carolina  44. Alaska
9-Pennsylvania    21. Mississippi    33. Alabama       45. Nebraska
10-West VA        22. New Mexico     34. Kentucky    46. S. Dakota
11-Maryland       23. Tennessee      35. Massachusetts 47. N. Dakota
12. Virginia          24. Arizona            36. Vermont
NEXT TIME: My Book World | Robert Caro's Working
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My Journey of States-47  North Dakota

9/4/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
The idea of education has been so tied to schools, universities, and professors that many assume there is no other way, but education is available to anyone within reach of a library, a post office, or even a newsstand.
—Louis L’Amour
Born March 22, 1908
in Jamestown, North Dakota
Died June 10, 1988
in Los Angeles, California
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L. L'Amour
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the forty-seventh post of fifty.

North Dakota  (2014)

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​Our visit to North Dakota was rather abbreviated. We were staying in South Dakota, and one day we got in the car and drove to their neighbor to the north. We had been aware that much in the way of oil drilling was going on because big trucks with oil rig business would pass us on Highway 83. When we actually crossed over the border we saw how intense the drilling was. ND’s area is 70,698 square miles. Its GDP is $52.527 Bn. Forty-four percent of its population  of 755, 393 is college educated. And its capital is located in Bismarck.
 
North Dakota became a state November 2, 1889, the fortieth state to enter the union.

Historical Postcards

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas                13. New Jersey     25. Michigan     37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma        14. Delaware         26. Wisconsin 38. Maine
3-Texas                   15. New York        27. Minnesota  39. Rhode Island
​4-Louisiana         16. Connecticut     28. Iowa               40. Idaho
5-Missouri           17. Colorado         29. Hawaii           41. Nevada
6-Illinois               18. Arkansas        30. Georgia         42. Utah
7-Indiana              19. California       31. S. Carolina   43. Washington
8-Ohio                   20. Florida             32. N. Carolina  44. Alaska
9-Pennsylvania    21. Mississippi    33. Alabama       45. Nebraska
10-West VA        22. New Mexico     34. Kentucky    46. S. Dakota
11-Maryland       23. Tennessee      35. Massachusetts
12. Virginia          24. Arizona            36. Vermont
NEXT TIME: My Book World | Garrett Peck's The Great War in America: World War I and Its Aftermath.
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We Are All Beneficiaries

8/30/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.
​Mary Shelley
Born August 30, 1797
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M. Shelley

My Book World

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​Scott, Janny. The Beneficiary: Fortune, Misfortune, and the Story of My Father. New York: Riverhead, 2019.

Journalist Janny Scott limns a harrowing portrait of her father, Robert Montgomery Scott, yet his story does not begin that way. Between the dedication and epigraph pages of the book appears a family tree extending back three generations. From a vast variety of sources, Scott brings to light the larger-than-life characters who are her ancestors, one set of grandparents and two sets of great-grandparents. Most persons would not necessarily know that much about their people, but for generations this family live off the good fortune and largesse of Thomas A. Scott, a railroad baron of the nineteenth century. They live on one property, Ardrossan, larger than New York’s Central Park, west of Philadelphia. Scott’s grandmother, flamboyant Helen Hope Montgomery, is the real-life personage upon which Katherine Hepburn’s character is based in the 1940 film, The Philadelphia Story. There is so much spectacle in this family, people who can, and do, almost anything they wish to do, that we almost lose sight of the subject of the book, Janny Scott’s father.
 
At one point, when journalist Scott is young and becomes interested in writing, her father promises her possession of his journals one day. Through the years the promise is lost, both because she puts the idea on a back burner and because her father is apparently reluctant to hand them over. Following his death, from a long bout with alcoholism, Janny Scott unearths them in one of those hiding-in-plain-sight locations, where all she must do is recall the four-digit default household code to unlatch his trunk, and voila, there they are: decades of notebooks full of loose-leaf pages. Scott magically (it’s really arduous work, one must realize) gathers all of her sources, including this gold mine, and produces a portrait of her father, the beneficiary of generations of great fortune. Only, the portrayal of a human life is never that simple. The rich—we often don’t have much sympathy for them—have a uniquely difficult time in life. They often wield too much power for their own good, and Scott herself says it best:
“The diaries, I began to think, were an inheritance of sorts—unanticipated, undeserved, a stroke of fortune. But, like an inheritance, they came at a cost. Land, houses, money: Wealth had tumbled in my father’s family from one generation to the next. Each new descendant arrived as an unwitting conduit for its transmission. You had a right to enjoy it, an obligation to protect it, a duty to pass it on to your own unsuspecting children. It was a stroke of good fortune, of course. But what you could never know, starting out, was how those things would influence decisions you’d make over a lifetime” (220)
In the epilogue, Scott makes clear that the Scott money ran out. Descendants of the railroad baron now live as far away as Los Angeles or Paris and many points in between. “They work in education, medicine, technology, consulting, music, banking, business, finance, landscape gardening, the law. They don’t live in big houses. They work for a living. But they’re beneficiaries, in one way or another, now and forever, for better and worse” (260)
As any good journalist, Scott knows when to remove herself from the story, always maintaining that important distance. At the same time, she lets us in on one of life’s greatest secrets, yet also a platitude, that money alone cannot buy happiness.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-47  North Dakota
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My Journey of States-46  South Dakota

8/28/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
Writing fiction is . . . an endless and always defeated effort to capture some quality of life without killing it.
--Rose Wilder Lane
Born December 5, 1886
De Smet, South Dakota Territory
Died October 30, 1968
Danbury, Connecticut
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R. Wilder Lane
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the forty-sixth post of fifty.

South Dakota (2014)

​Ken and I arrived in South Dakota in early May. Grasses had greened, and some trees leafed out, yet on one of the days we headed for Mount Rushmore National Memorial, the sky spit snow in our eyes, and the wind shoved frigid air across our faces; the second time we returned, as photos above reveal, the skies were clear. Later in the day, we visited Crazy Horse Memorial, a thirty-minute drive southwest of Mount Rushmore. 
 
South Dakota became a US territory with the Lousiana Purchase, in 1803. It achieved statehood on November 2, 1889 as the fortieth state.

Historical Postcards and Trunk Decals

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas                13. New Jersey     25. Michigan     37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma        14. Delaware         26. Wisconsin 38. Maine
3-Texas                   15. New York        27. Minnesota  39. Rhode Island
​4-Louisiana         16. Connecticut     28. Iowa               40. Idaho
5-Missouri           17. Colorado         29. Hawaii           41. Nevada
6-Illinois               18. Arkansas        30. Georgia         42. Utah
7-Indiana              19. California       31. S. Carolina   43. Washington
8-Ohio                   20. Florida             32. N. Carolina  44. Alaska
9-Pennsylvania    21. Mississippi    33. Alabama       45. Nebraska
10-West VA        22. New Mexico     34. Kentucky
11-Maryland       23. Tennessee      35. Massachusetts
12. Virginia          24. Arizona            36. Vermont
NEXT TIME: My Book World | Janny Scott's The Beneficiary
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My Journey of States-45  Nebraska

8/21/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
Flying is hypnotic and all pilots are victims to the spell. Their world is like a magic island in which the factors of life and death assume their proper values. Thinking becomes clear because there are no earthly foibles or embellishments to confuse it.
Ernest K. Gann
Born October 10, 1910
Lincoln, Nebraska
Died December 19, 1991
Friday Harbor, Washington
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E. K. Gann
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the forty-fifth post of fifty.

Nebraska (2014)

Ken and I stayed at one of those nondescript road motels that begins with an “H.” The young woman at the desk asked me what brought us to Nebraska. And I told her that I was attempting to log visits to four of my last ten states. She seemed to have an inferiority complex about Nebraska which I’ve witnessed before. One time, I met a young gay man visiting Texas from Omaha. I simply asked him what gay life was like in Omaha, certainly assuming it was better than Lubbock’s, and he got all defensive about it, as if I were making fun. Anyway, I told the woman that driving north on Highway 83, we’d seen some of the most beautiful land ever. Northeast Kansas and southeast Nebraska are not entirely flat, nor entirely agricultural. There is a very pastoral scene there, even if a Nebraska waterway called the Dismal River runs through it. Nebraska, you’ve got some PR to do. You can’t rely entirely on your ‘Huskers to make your name in the world! You need a WillaCatherLand or something.
 
Nebraska became the thirty-seventh state on March 1, 1867 and celebrated its sesquicentennial in 2017. 

Historical Postcards

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas                13. New Jersey     25. Michigan     37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma        14. Delaware         26. Wisconsin 38. Maine
3-Texas                   15. New York        27. Minnesota  39. Rhode Island
​4-Louisiana         16. Connecticut     28. Iowa               40. Idaho
5-Missouri           17. Colorado         29. Hawaii           41. Nevada
6-Illinois               18. Arkansas        30. Georgia         42. Utah
7-Indiana              19. California       31. S. Carolina   43. Washington
8-Ohio                   20. Florida             32. N. Carolina  44. Alaska
9-Pennsylvania    21. Mississippi    33. Alabama
10-West VA        22. New Mexico     34. Kentucky
11-Maryland       23. Tennessee      35. Massachusetts
12. Virginia          24. Arizona            36. Vermont
NEXT TIME: My Book World | Andrew Sean Greer's Less: A Novel
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Theft By Finding: Root of All Good Writing

8/16/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
The view after seventy is breathtaking. What is lacking is someone, anyone, of the older generation to whom you can turn when you want to satisfy your curiosity about some detail of the landscape of the past. There is no longer any older generation. You have become it, while your mind was mostly on other matters.
​William Maxwell
Born August 16, 1908
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W. Maxwell

My Book World

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Sedaris, David. Theft By Finding: Diaries 1977-2002. New York: Little, 2017.

Sedaris explains the meaning of his title right away, stating that in England if you find something, particularly money, you are duty bound to try and locate the owner or else you are guilty of theft by finding. At least in the beginning, when Sedaris is poor, he seems to find all kinds of money. Good thing he’s an American!
 
The voyeur in me always loves reading authors’ diaries and letters (email has obliterated the latter for future readers), and Sedaris’s diaries are among the best I’ve read. His mind is one that, for the most part, is completely unbridled. He learns early not to edit (in the psychological sense) his writing. He turns a trip to the market into a comic play. His desperate work situations, the same. He records jokes people have told him. He’s not a writer who stays at home, and, because of that, life serves him a big platter of human waste to transform into delectable satire. I marked so many funny or moving passages but I’ll only list a few nuggets here: 
 
 “Man to a woman he’d just screwed: If I’d known you
         were a virgin, I’d have taken more time.
Woman: If I’d known you had more time, I would have
         taken my panty hose off” (35).
 
“Edith Sitwell said that one of her favorite pastimes was to sharpen her claws on the wooden heads of her opponents” (112). [I cannot corroborate this anywhere online, but it sounds like Sitwell. Must have thieved it at a party.]
 
“Deodorizing puck = urinal cake” (130)
 
From Patricia Marx, in 1986, Sedaris gets a bit of advice we could now pass along to Congress or Trump about how to handle the Russians: “If we want a three-year-old not to put his hand on a hot stove, we do not beat him unmercifully. Rather, we teach him that a stove is hot, by pressing his hand to the burner for a minute or two” (155). We need to press Russia’ fat little hands to the burner!
 
While working as Santa at SantaLand: “Yesterday a woman had her son pee into a cup, which of course tipped over. ‘That’s fine,’ I said, ‘but Santa’s also going to need a stool sample’” (278).
 
Sedaris’s entries becomes even funnier, in 1993, when his career takes off with Barrel Fever. 
 
“Harry Rowohlt, the fellow who translated my book into German and is reading with me on my tour, told me that when someone on the bus or at a nearby table in a restaurant talks on a cell phone, he likes to lean over and shout, “Come back to bed, I’m freezing’” (391). This was recorded in 1991. Good luck with pulling that stunt now.
 
Of course, Sedaris’s theft by finding not only refers to the $45 or $50 or $100 he happens upon but also to the stories he hears, dramas that play out around him, whether they be in his family or at airports or in the marketplace. He records his thoughts on world events, Diana’s death in Paris, JFK Junior’s demise. He has something to say about everything, and I believe that is one aspect of his work that makes him a fine writer. Nothing is too highbrow or lowbrow for fodder. Step up to the trough and feed!

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-45  Nebraska
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My Journey of States-44  Alaska

8/14/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
The true measure of a man is how he behaves when death is close.
Alma Katsu
Born November 29, 1959
Fairbanks, Alaska
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A. Katsu
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the forty-fourth post of fifty.

Alaska (2011)

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​Saturday, May 21, 2011 
In Seattle, Ken and I board the Holland American ms Westerdam and head for open sea. It is 48°. We’ve never been on a cool-weather cruise before, but so far we like it. The décor designed for the Dutch firm is subtle and nuanced, not garish like some other lines I could mention. The crew are polite and friendly but not overly so. Not long after we enter our stateroom, we meet our steward for the trip. Each morning that he makes up the bed he will fold a single white towel into caricatures of various animals. See photos below.
​Wednesday, May 25, 2011 – Sitka, Alaska
Our vessel is at anchor beginning at nine a.m. We will depart near five p.m. Our visit will be the length of a work day, and the group we’re with make the most of it. We all board a jitney, and a guide steps on board to be with us. At least three times throughout our day she informs us how lucky we are that the sun is shining and that the temps are in the seventies. It could be cool and damp, she says. There exists and interesting blend of Russian and Tlingit Indian influences that make the day memorable. 
​Tuesday, May 24, 2011 – Hubbard Glacier
I’m not sure it’s wise, but the captain glides our behemoth ship in close to view the glacier up close. The deck is crowded with passengers especially on the starboard side. I’ve seen glaciers calving on film but never live before. Of course, everyone is bundled up, and we can see our breath while back in Texas the highs are in the nineties. I stare and can’t help wonder what kind of shape of this glacier will be in a decade from now.
​Thursday, May 26, 2011 – Ketchikan, Alaska
We dock at 6:41 a.m. and undock at 12:56 p.m., making for a short visit. Ken and I actually remain aboard and watch the action from our spacious terrace. The town’s shops are painted a variety of bright colors, and I photograph the geographic features that serve as a backdrop: the trickling down of a waterfall, the fog, a thick green forest. It is 57°. I fully understand that we’ve only seen a small fraction of what Alaska has to offer the tourist this week, but I do hope to return one day and see more.
After a long and checkered past with the U.S., beginning in 1867, Alaska finally achieved statehood early in 1959, when I was in fifth grade. ​​

HISTORICAL POSTCARDS & TRUNK DECALS

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas                13. New Jersey     25. Michigan     37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma        14. Delaware         26. Wisconsin 38. Maine
3-Texas                   15. New York        27. Minnesota  39. Rhode Island
​4-Louisiana         16. Connecticut     28. Iowa               40. Idaho
5-Missouri           17. Colorado         29. Hawaii           41. Nevada
6-Illinois               18. Arkansas        30. Georgia         42. Utah
7-Indiana              19. California       31. S. Carolina   43. Washington
8-Ohio                   20. Florida             32. N. Carolina
9-Pennsylvania    21. Mississippi    33. Alabama
10-West VA        22. New Mexico     34. Kentucky
11-Maryland       23. Tennessee      35. Massachusetts
12. Virginia          24. Arizona            36. Vermont
NEXT TIME: My Book World | David Sedaris, Theft By Finding, Diaries 1977-2002
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Metaphor from the Physical World

8/9/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
​
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
     They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
     And add some extra, just for you.
 
But they were fucked up in their turn
     By fools in old-style hats and coats,   
Who half the time were soppy-stern
      And half at one another’s throats.
 
Man hands on misery to man.
       It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
       And don’t have any kids yourself.
Philip Larkin
Born August 9, 1922
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P. Larkin

My Book World

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Houston, Pam. Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country. New York: Norton, 2019.

Pam Houston may be the single best teacher of writing in the U.S. today, not only by way of her classroom techniques (which I know of firsthand) but by way of example, and Deep Creek proves my case. Houston’s main tenet, always, is to begin with the concrete details—whether fiction or nonfiction—and those details will lead you to your narrative.
“I have always believed that if I pay strict attention while I am out in the physical world—and for me that often meant the natural world—the physical world will give me everything I need to tell my stories” (78).

Having studied with Pam, I can tell you she calls one’s paying attention to these details “glimmers”: that conversation you overhear at the market, the accident you see on the way to your doctor’s appointment. Your doctor’s appointment. Everywhere you look throughout your day, if you’re alive, you should be paying attention to these glimmers. Of course, they can come from your past, as well, but something from the past can be a bit dusty, so, once again, your mind must return to the concrete details. Houston says,

​“I believe—like religion—that the glimmer, the metaphor, if you will, knows a great deal more than I do. And if I stay out of its way, it will reveal itself to me. I will become not so much its keeper as its conduit, and I will pass its wisdom on to the reader, without actually getting in its way” (79).
​And once again, as in all Houston’s stories, novels, or essays, she mines the glimmers in her life to reveal to readers her twenty-five year acquaintance with a patch of land high in the Colorado Rockies, at the headwaters of the Rio Grande, her ranch; the extreme physical, sexual, and emotional abuse her parents heaped upon her; the nanny, Martha Washington, who was more of a mother to her than anyone; obtaining the ranch property and hanging onto it by a thread at times, both financially and in terms of the physical world which, where she lives, has an extreme impact on human life whether it be the winter temperatures and snow and ice or a hundred-year fire or human encroachment. Many metaphors guide her. She lives by a purely spiritual (not religious) guide: What are the best ways for me to be kind to others and to the earth I live on, and how can I leave both better off before I leave this earth? Because of her childhood abuse, Pam grows up always on guard, always ready to leap into the future, and that is how she often lives: running literally to all four corners of our, at times, flat earth. She is invited or invites herself to some of the most strenuous and exhilarating ventures around. And in this book she makes each one of them shine, or glimmer.
NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-44  Alaska
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My Journey of States -43  Washington

8/7/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
​Sixty percent of all Indians live in urban areas, but nobody's writing about them. They're really an underrepresented population, and the ironic thing is very, very few of those we call Native American writers actually grew up on reservations, and yet most of their work is about reservations.
--Sherman Alexie
Born October 7, 1966
Spokane, Washington
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S. Alexie
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the forty-third post of fifty.

Washington (2011)

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​The only place I’ve visited in Washington is Seattle, where Ken and I embarked on a Holland America ship headed for Alaska (see my profile next week). But we spent a couple of days there before leaving and a day upon return, giving us a good feel for the city. I was surprised by the topography, that it gives San Francisco a run for its money on its steepness, known informally for its “seven hills,” like Rome. Hee hee. I loved the outdoor market, where you can watch the vendors toss a fifteen- or twenty-pound salmon to a paying customer, who’d better catch it. I loved the vibe, the fact that much public art adorns the city, that it was one of the first cities to raise its minimum wage to $12. And then there’s the coffee, ah, the coffee—if you like that sort of thing.
 
Washington was the forty-second state to be admitted to the union in 1889.

Historical Postcards & Trunk Decals

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas                13. New Jersey     25. Michigan     37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma        14. Delaware         26. Wisconsin 38. Maine
3-Texas                   15. New York        27. Minnesota  39. Rhode Island
​4-Louisiana         16. Connecticut     28. Iowa               40. Idaho
5-Missouri           17. Colorado         29. Hawaii           41. Nevada
6-Illinois               18. Arkansas        30. Georgia         42. Utah
7-Indiana              19. California       31. S. Carolina
8-Ohio                   20. Florida             32. N. Carolina
9-Pennsylvania    21. Mississippi    33. Alabama
10-West VA        22. New Mexico     34. Kentucky
11-Maryland       23. Tennessee      35. Massachusetts
12. Virginia          24. Arizona            36. Vermont
NEXT TIME: My Book World | Pam Houston's Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country
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My Journey of States-42  Utah

7/31/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
​The best poetry has its roots in the subconscious to a great degree. Youth, naivety, reliance on instinct more than learning and method, a sense of freedom and play, even trust in randomness, is necessary to the making of a poem.
— May Swenson
Born May 28, 1913
Logan, Utah
Died December 4, 1989
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M. Swenson
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the forty-second post of fifty.

Utah (2015)

The first time Ken and I were in Utah the visit was rather unintentional, hardly worth mentioning, but I shall. We had booked a Southwest flight from Lubbock to Boise, one of us, ahem, assuming we had only one stop in Las Vegas, the western hub. Wrong. We wound up stopping both in Reno and Salt Lake City before touching down in Idaho. Our second visit was still sort of a pass-through, but, at least we spent the night south of SLC, in Provo. We ate dinner at the Village Inn, and the most interesting aspect of our dinner was that we were seated in a booth wedged between two young couples, both Mormon, we assumed, by virtue of their conversations: two-year service and such. I can’t really remember, but we clearly witnessed the two most innocuous heart-to-hearts I’ve ever overheard in a restaurant, especially for people in the shank of their youth. ¶ The next day, we stopped at the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, which totally redeemed the dismalness of the night before. I’ve posted a number of photographs of the birds we were able to snag while there. It was a lovely way to spend a morning!
 
It became the forty-fifth state on January 4, 1896, and celebrated its centennial on that date in 1996.

HISTORICAL POSTCARDS & Trunk Decals

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas                13. New Jersey     25. Michigan     37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma        14. Delaware         26. Wisconsin 38. Maine
3-Texas                   15. New York        27. Minnesota  39. Rhode Island
​4-Louisiana         16. Connecticut     28. Iowa               40. Idaho
5-Missouri           17. Colorado         29. Hawaii           41. Nevada
6-Illinois               18. Arkansas        30. Georgia
7-Indiana              19. California       31. S. Carolina
8-Ohio                   20. Florida             32. N. Carolina
9-Pennsylvania    21. Mississippi    33. Alabama
10-West VA        22. New Mexico     34. Kentucky
11-Maryland       23. Tennessee      35. Massachusetts
12. Virginia          24. Arizona            36. Vermont
NEXT TIME: My Book World | Robert W. Fiesler's Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation
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The Corfu Trilogy: A Delight to Read

7/26/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; and do not outlive yourself.
​George Bernard Shaw
​Born July 26, 1856
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G. Shaw

My Book World

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Durrell, Gerald. The Corfu Trilogy: My Family and Other Animals; Birds, Beasts, and Relatives; The Garden of the Gods. New York: Penguin, 2006.

In viewing the PBS Masterpiece series The Durrells in Corfu, I was spurred on to read the original material, and I was not disappointed. Gerald Durrell, youngest of four children, records his eccentric family’s doings in a rather unique and remarkable manner. In all three books--My Family and Other Animals (1956); Birds, Beasts, and Relatives (1969); The Garden of the Gods (1978)—Durrell wafts back and forth between two kinds of scenes. In one type, he writes extensively of his family: his mother, his brothers Larry and Leslie, and his sister Margo, not to mention a host of odd characters both Greek and British, who visit the Durrells in Corfu. In the other type, Durrell writes elegantly of his love for the natural world: spending entire chapters sometimes describing odd or unusual creatures from the very small to much larger, from owls he rescues to a stubborn mule he bargains for. I kept reading the 750 pages, with delight, until I was finished—almost sorry that the adventures were over. Well worth your time if a saga about a British family living on a Greek island just prior to World War II piques your interest.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-42  Utah
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My Journey of States-41  Nevada

7/24/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
If women could go into your Congress, I think justice would soon be done to the Indians.
--Sarah Winnemucca
Born c1844
Near Humboldt Lake, Nevada
Died October 16, 1891
Idaho
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S. Winnemucca
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the forty-first post of fifty.

Nevada (2009-2018)

​I have long held a disquieting feeling about Christmas. Its messages are mixed: on the one hand, it is religious celebration of the birth of a major religious figure; on the other, Christmas is the biggest Capitalist opportunity to get rich (or break even) off the back of that little baby born 2,000 years ago. No cognitive dissonance for you? Well, okay, I’m just built that way, I guess. Anyhoo . . . in 2010, when a friend invited Ken and me to spend six days as her guest in Las Vegas, we said, “Hell, yeah.” No tree to set up. No presents (the trip is our gift to one another). No holiday parties to endure. And we are now approaching our tenth Xmas in Vegas.
​Nevada, itself, is filled with paradoxes: a state with nearly twenty Indian reservations yet one city with all the largest casinos; Las Vegas with its two million Bedouins living like city slickers; LV with its magnificent water features yet a limited single source (Lake Mead); a city of great riches yet poor souls passed out on The Strip, some with tin cups in hand; blazing summers yet AC that induces one to wear a hoody indoors. Lowbrow and highbrow entertainment, all in one city. What more could a tourist ask for? Honestly, I love Christmas in Vegas. There, the holiday is but a footnote, and that makes me happy. 
 
Nevada was the thirty-sixth state to be admitted into the union in 1864 and celebrated its sesquicentennial in 2014.

Historical Postcards

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas                13. New Jersey     25. Michigan     37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma        14. Delaware         26. Wisconsin 38. Maine
3-Texas                   15. New York        27. Minnesota  39. Rhode Island
​4-Louisiana         16. Connecticut     28. Iowa               40. Idaho
5-Missouri           17. Colorado         29. Hawaii
6-Illinois               18. Arkansas        30. Georgia
7-Indiana              19. California       31. S. Carolina
8-Ohio                   20. Florida             32. N. Carolina
9-Pennsylvania    21. Mississippi    33. Alabama
10-West VA        22. New Mexico     34. Kentucky
11-Maryland       23. Tennessee      35. Massachusetts
12. Virginia          24. Arizona            36. Vermont
NEXT TIME: My Book World | Gerald Durrell's Corfu Trilogy
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My Journey of States-40  Idaho

7/17/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.
Ezra Pound
Born October 30, 1885  Hailey, Idaho
Died November 1, 1972  Venice, Italy
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E. Pound
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the fortieth post of fifty.

Idaho (2008, 2010, 2015)

Some places you visit because you know people who live there. In teaching graduate students at Texas Tech summer school, my partner Ken introduced one of his female students to a young English professor who was teaching creative writing at the same time (I believe this to be true). The couple later married, and the professor was instrumental in getting me into the MA program at TTU. Before I could finish my degree, Ann and Daryl moved to Boise, and years later, after Ken and I retired, we visited them at their home, once in summer and once in autumn.
Boise is a well-kept secret, with a fine university. A river running through it (couldn't resist), in fact, a cultivated green belt for athletes, zoo-goers, museum attendees, and fresh-air breathers of all kinds. A great center for cinema, especially the Egyptian Theatre. A breeding ground for writers and authors. Most of all, a humane population. One night, after the four of us had attended a play at the Idaho Shakespeare Festival Amphitheater, the crowd strolled toward a huge parking lot. I figured, as in Texas, that there would be a huge push—cars streaming in all directions—to scramble to the closest exit. I was astounded when, as we reached a certain nexus, a four-way stop, each line of drivers took his or her turn heading for the exit. Ken and I asked if that was normal, and our friends quietly insisted it was. A state that uses a saying like “Drive Friendly” could sure learn something from that genteel bunch of Idahoans. Ken and I confessed that if we’d only encountered the place ten years earlier, we might have retired there. Of course, it just could have been a bunch of talk.

Idaho was the forty-third state to be admitted into the Union on July 3, 1890. Its state bird is the Mountain Bluebird, and it boasts a population of 1.7 million people.

HISTORIC POSTCARDS AND TRUNK DECALS

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas                13. New Jersey     25. Michigan     37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma        14. Delaware         26. Wisconsin 38. Maine
3-Texas                   15. New York        27. Minnesota  39. Rhode Island
​4-Louisiana         16. Connecticut     28. Iowa
5-Missouri           17. Colorado         29. Hawaii
6-Illinois               18. Arkansas        30. Georgia
7-Indiana              19. California       31. S. Carolina
8-Ohio                   20. Florida             32. N. Carolina
9-Pennsylvania    21. Mississippi    33. Alabama
10-West VA        22. New Mexico     34. Kentucky
11-Maryland       23. Tennessee      35. Massachusetts
12. Virginia          24. Arizona            36. Vermont
NEXT TIME: My Book World | Alexander Chee's How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
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My Journey of States-39  Rhode Island

7/10/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
To me, poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment. 
Galway Kinnell
Born February 1, 1927 
Providence, Rhode Island
Died October 28, 2014
Sheffield, Vermont
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G. Kinnell
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the thirty-ninth post of fifty.

Rhode Island (2003)

I must admit that Rhode Island is one of the fifty states through which I made one of those pass-through visits, as I did with Delaware. However, I feel a literary connection with the state because of one writer, Edith Wharton. If Ken and I had had time, we most surely would have visited her former residence, Land’s End, located in Newport and portrayed in her novel, The Age of Innocence. I visited her other home, The Mount, in Lenox, Massachusetts three times over the period of a decade, and so, upon my return to the state Newport shall be my first stop.

​Rhode Island became thirteenth of the original thirteen states, in 1790, and its official name is Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. 

Historical Postcards

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas                13. New Jersey     25. Michigan     37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma        14. Delaware         26. Wisconsin 38. Maine
3-Texas                   15. New York        27. Minnesota
​4-Louisiana         16. Connecticut     28. Iowa
5-Missouri           17. Colorado         29. Hawaii
6-Illinois               18. Arkansas        30. Georgia
7-Indiana              19. California       31. S. Carolina
8-Ohio                   20. Florida             32. N. Carolina
9-Pennsylvania    21. Mississippi    33. Alabama
10-West VA        22. New Mexico     34. Kentucky
11-Maryland       23. Tennessee      35. Massachusetts
12. Virginia          24. Arizona            36. Vermont
NEXT TIME: My Book World | Milkman​ by Anna Burns, Booker Prize Winner
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Back in the Saddle

7/8/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
In brief, I spend half my time trying to learn the secrets of other writers—to apply them to the expression of my own thoughts.
​​Shirley Ann Grau
​Born July 8, 1929
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This and That

THIS: I haven't posted for over five months for the reasons I stated at the end of January. First, my longtime partner of forty-three years, Ken Dixon, was diagnosed with a BIG spur on his C5 vertebra which was crowding his spinal cord in a BIG way. In order to knock it off in the least invasive way, the surgeon came in from the front, and removed C6 to get at the spur and screwed in a spacer between 5 and 7, filling it with bone debris that has and will continue to make new bone material. The surgery and recovery went well, but being in charge of everything made me a very busy boy. The procedure, a corpectomy reduced his pain and stabilized his blood pressure, yet he continues to work with other professionals solving the riddle of vertigo. He's back in the studio for limited sessions.
THAT: I spent the entire month of June at a dandy place in the Texas Hill Country known as Hacienda Maria, what I refer to as a mini-villa that one can lease from the Native American Seed company of Junction, Texas. Just rural enough to enjoy the pastoral nature of the country roads, it was also a short six miles into town to buy groceries or mail a letter. ¶ I was able to read ALOUD my 550-page manuscript twice, literally finding my voice for the book. I made and entered in the computer numerous corrections, attempting to smooth out clunky language, as well as other problems which I shall not go into here. Anyway, I probably accomplished four months of work in one, putting me closer to finishing the monster.
MORE THIS: I plan to post regularly again, continuing my Tuesday/Thursday posts of A Writer's Wit, advice other writers have offered either about their work or the writing process in general. On Wednesdays, I shall continue my series, My Journey of States, until I have finished with all fifty! And finally, on Fridays, I offer profiles of new (or vintage) titles in My Book World series.
THE LAST OF THAT: A year ago I deleted my Facebook page primarily because I was disgusted with their cavalier approach to running a business. During that time, their corporate leaders have done even more to make me glad I dropped out. Personally, I believe the organization will have to shut down and do a FB 2.0 to build a more secure Web site from the ground up. Until it's improved at least, I remain a departed client. HOWEVER, I do miss seeing what's happening with family and friends. Drop a line, plee hee heez. ¶ I also deleted my Twitter account. I never was able to garner more than two hundred fifty followers, and, because I'd made the mistake of following some political operatives instead of sticking to purely literary interests, I was having to read a lot of negative stuff. It wasn't my followers' words but those of people "commenting." Negative. Negative. Negative. My only social media presence is now on LinkedIn, and if anyone can tell me how to make the most of THAT, I'd appreciate it. WHEW! I've said more than I wished to. I look forward to seeing and hearing from you as I regain my Internet presence. 
NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-39  Rhode Island
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A Dark Room Fills with Light

1/25/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
A bonny lass I will confess,
       Is pleasant to the e’e,
But without some better qualities
       She’s no a lass for me.
​Robert Burns
Born January 25, 1759
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R. Burns

My Book World

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​Faludi, Susan. In the Darkroom. New York: Picador,
     2016.
 
One sign that a book may be spectacularly well written is that the author’s process seems inscrutable. In the case of Susan Faludi, she combines journalistic techniques of conducting interviews, whether recorded or not, along with long months, perhaps years of tedious research of all kinds, but finally she observes and interprets the relationship she has (or has not) with her own father. Yet how she weaves all these together remains a wonderful mystery.
 
Faludi’s memoir is comprised of many things: history of the tragic past of Hungary and Hungarian Jews, how that history informs her father’s life as Steven Faludi, her more recent life as Stefi Faludi; it is a journal of the author’s relationship with her father over many years, even years in which they neither speak nor see one another; it is a book about identity, how one can shapeshift to obscure oneself, whether it is her father’s masquerading as a young Nazi in order to rescue family members from being executed or whether it his change from male to female, whether it is changing one’s name from Friedman to Faludi. Ultimately, the book portrays the long, fraught journey that father and daughter take together, a journey that, at any time could be cut short, but because of some ephemeral formula, manages to continue until the very end, when Stefi’s very substantial constitution finally fails. This body—lying on a hospital bed in Budapest has sustained parental neglect, physical and emotional battles of war, marriage, and family life, abuse it has both endured and afflicted on her daughter, the physical and emotional rigors of gender reassignment surgery—finally succumbs to death. The author has flown from Portland, Oregon, to be with her father Stefi in Budapest, yet Susan sees that her father is resting, she decides she must get some rest at her father’s apartment. She is awakened by a phone call at six a.m. the next morning:
“Hallo,” the voice in the receiver said. “This is Dr. Molnárné.”
Yes, I said, unsure if I was awake or still in a dream.
“I’m sorry to inform you. Your father is dead.”
“What? How could . . . this be?”
“Some time after five this morning.”
“I see,” I said, now alert—and accusatory. “What was the cause?”
“Nothing special,” the doctor said. “She just died” (458).   
As with the entirety of Susan’s relationship with Steven/Stefi, this process has not gone as it should. According to Susan’s thinking, she was to have located a dementia specialist, and that act would perhaps extend his life. At worst, Susan was to have been at Stefi’s side; they were to have had one final word of reconciliation before he parted; one final hand-holding while blood still flowed through both bodies.
 
An astounding book, where echoing off the title, the author takes the reader through many dark rooms, including photographic darkrooms, but others more sinister, to limn the lives of an extraordinary father and her daughter. A must read.
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My Journey of States-38  Maine

1/23/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellows of the cell to whatever age of history they may belong.
Sarah Orne Jewett
Born September 3, 1849
South Berwick, Maine
Died June 24, 1909
South Berwick, Maine
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S. Jewett
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the thirty-eighth post of fifty.

Maine (2008)

Ken and I drove from our outpost in Massachusetts to Maine in the autumn of 2008, just prior to the election. It seemed like quite a distance, at first. Could we really make a day trip of it? Turned out to be a little over a three-hour drive, what we consider a short jaunt in Texas. A friend from the area had told us we must indulge in a lobster roll or two, so for lunch we stopped at a large establishment that seemed to specialize in it (large lobster sign). Meh. It wasn’t anything to write to Washington about, but we enjoyed it and moved on to the Acadia National Park, where we climbed Cadillac Mountain. And then onto Maine’s magnificent coast and charming lighthouses. We spent the night in a motel, and on our drive back, half the political signs seemed to be for Obama and the other half for McCain, a prescient view of our present situation.
 
Maine, the twenty-third state admitted to the Union, will celebrate its bicentennial in 2020. 

HISTORICAL POSTCARDS & TRUNK DECALS

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas                13. New Jersey     25. Michigan     37. N. Hampshire
2-Oklahoma        14. Delaware         26. Wisconsin
3-Texas                   15. New York        27. Minnesota
​4-Louisiana         16. Connecticut     28. Iowa
5-Missouri           17. Colorado         29. Hawaii
6-Illinois               18. Arkansas        30. Georgia
7-Indiana              19. California       31. S. Carolina
8-Ohio                   20. Florida             32. N. Carolina
9-Pennsylvania    21. Mississippi    33. Alabama
10-West VA        22. New Mexico     34. Kentucky
11-Maryland       23. Tennessee      35. Massachusetts
12. Virginia          24. Arizona            36. Vermont
NEXT TIME: My Book World, Susan Faludi's Memoir, In the Darkroom
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Parker Posey's Memoir: on Gossamer Wings

1/18/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
A writer wants something more than money for his work: he wants permanence.
A. A. Milne
​Born January 18, 1882
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A. Milne

My Book World

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​Posey, Parker. You’re on an Airplane: A Self-Mythologizing Memoir. New York: Blue Rider, 2018.
 
I must preface my remarks by professing that I am a HUGE Parker Posey fan. I luh, luh, love her work. I can’t say I’ve seen ALL of her films, because sometimes they’re not easy to find, but I have to declare that whether Posey is the kooky character in the Tales of the City series or featured in one of her other roles, she is a brilliant character actress who prefers those parts to leading ones; at least that is the impression she gives. Yet I believe that because of her power as an actor her best roles may yet lie ahead, if she can find the right properties. So say I.
 
Unlike many actors, who have suffered untold damage in their childhoods, Posey seems to have flourished because of the strong relationships with family members, particularly her parents, who encourage her in her creativity. Yet Posey does not make acting sound easy or even appealing. Rather, she shares in great detail what many of her film shoots are like, the actors and directors with whom she associates herself for weeks or months. The squabbles, insightful observations about the business of making film.
 
What a fun yet significant read! Part scrapbook, part photo album, part Dear Diary, part tell-all, part recipe book, this memoir reads as if it is a monologue right out of one of her films. At turns, kooky, serious, honest, even a bit mean (in a kind sort of way):
“I also started doing this thing when I drove around, that is completely obnoxious or funny, depending on who you are and how you feel: I’d roll down my window, get a person’s attention on the sidewalk or crossing the street, and call out, ‘Excuse me! Are you a vegan?!’ Or I got the attention of someone in a car at a stop sign and said causally (but a little too loud), ‘I AM A VEGAN.’ This was more fun in the passenger seat, when I’d get to hang out of the car. It was good clean fun—unlike veganism, which is hard work.
 
I get this from my parents—doing silly, unexpected stuff. One time we went on a trip and my mon wanted to stop at a mall for a shopping fix, so we went into a store called Spencer’s and bought some plastic masks. My dad wore a Nixon one, I remember, and my mom was a pig. They’d put them on as they drove, and we’d see who they could freak out, laughing until we made ourselves tired. It wasn’t cool anymore to drink in the car, so that’s how they replaced their fun. Not really, they still drank in the car, but in moderation” (189).
​These passages seems so indicative of Parker Posey’s life: somewhat carefree, devil-may-care-what-happens-to-me, opinionated, fearless. Sort of her generation’s Tallulah Bankhead; in fact, I could so see her playing Bankhead in a biopic. Hey, Parker’s agent, are you reading this? Tallulah Bankhead, you hear!
 
Yet, Posey reveals what may be her true view of acting:
“It’s an industry (an art, hopefully) full of orphans left to create their own worlds with one another. I don’t feel glamorous, I feel like a possum—the animal born clinging to its mother’s tail, that grows up by falling off it, and probably too soon. Acting is the possum’s defense. Have you ever seen this? When threatened, they play dead—and they’re very convincing at it. They scare themselves so deeply that their eyes roll back into their heads and their little tongues stick out. They’ll even take it so far as to froth at the mouth They’ll go on with the act as long as they’re terrified and its truly ghoulish, because they’ve been known to be buried alive—they’re famous for it” (227).
 
And Posey doesn’t sugarcoat what an actor’s life can be like:
 
“A dollar seventy-five in my bank account, isn’t that too much? It doesn’t make sense, right? But all those independent movies I did in the nineties were done on the cheap. I was counting coins, which I’d put in those paper roll-ups to take to the deli so I could buy pasta to make for dinner. I didn’t know anyone else who was famous and broke” (288).
​The conceit that formulates this book is that Parker is seated on an airplane and sharing her life with a seatmate. Occasionally, the reader forgets, until once again, Posey throws in a second-person address to this imaginary person. I say imaginary  because I believe this person is really dead, or at least never talks back to Parker Posey. The format may or may not work, but Posey’s life is certainly quirky yet profound enough to sustain my interest for over 300 pages! 

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-38  Maine
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My Journey of States-37  New Hampshire

1/16/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
I would no more quarrel with a man because of his religion than I would because of his art.
Mary Baker Eddy
Born July 16, 1821
Bow, New Hampshire
Died December 3, 1910
Newton, Massachusetts
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M. Eddy
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the thirty-seventh post of fifty.

New Hampshire (2003, 2008)

​What I recall most about New Hampshire is that Ken and I were visiting in Massachusetts and decided to make a daytrip to NH, but a driving rainstorm kept us in the car, mostly. Sad to say that the other time we drove through New Hampshire it was on our way to Maine. NH—the Granite State and tenth least populous—was the ninth state to be admitted to the Union and celebrated its bicentennial in 1988.

Historical Postcards & Trunk Decals

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas                13. New Jersey     25. Michigan 
2-Oklahoma        14. Delaware         26. Wisconsin
3-Texas                   15. New York        27. Minnesota
​4-Louisiana         16. Connecticut     28. Iowa
5-Missouri           17. Colorado         29. Hawaii
6-Illinois               18. Arkansas        30. Georgia
7-Indiana              19. California       31. S. Carolina
8-Ohio                   20. Florida             32. N. Carolina
9-Pennsylvania    21. Mississippi    33. Alabama
10-West VA        22. New Mexico     34. Kentucky
11-Maryland       23. Tennessee      35. Massachusetts
12. Virginia          24. Arizona            36. Vermont
NEXT TIME: My Book World, Parker Posey's Memoir
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Sally Field's Memoir Is Powerful

1/11/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
If you donate to a charity and save a few kids, 20 years down the line, there will be more people who exist because of you. In other words, you should consider your actions fully.
​Diana Gabaldon
Born January 11, 1952
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D. Gabaldon

My Book World

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​Field, Sally. In Pieces: A Memoir. New York: Grand Central, 2018.
 
Many celebrity memoirs or autobiographies seem to read as if the author has recorded his or her story and transcribed it word for word—with little benefit of revision or constructive editing. Not so with Sally Field. The arc of her narrative advances from one point of tension to the next until the climax splatters on the page like a scene from one of her films. In making herself vulnerable to all the revealed truths of her life, she encourages readers to acknowledge their own truths, and because of this honesty readers are willing to forgive her her foibles. Even if Field does not possess a degree from an accredited institution (a lifetime regret on her part), she creates prose that stands up to that of any fine writer. Moreover, she does a superb job of connecting the emotional DNA from great-grandmother to grandmother to mother to Sally. She quotes from Jung as her touchstone:
“‘Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent’” (29)
​That both her mother and stepfather are failed actors (in the sense that they cannot sustain lifelong careers) contributes to how they relate to Sally as the child. The public may be tempted to believe that because one is offered a TV series at age eighteen said actor has it made for the rest of her life. Not so. Field makes plain how actors for many years may live from hand to mouth—without health insurance, without home ownership, sometimes without food for themselves or families. Not only do Sally’s parents experience these pitfalls, but so does she. As the star of Gidget, she is suddenly supporting her parents and siblings, because both her parents are at low points their own careers. And the path never gets easier. One might be paid quite well for one film but then the next project is not in sight, and an actor must stretch that income until something does come along. Moreover, Field has her own children and spouse to support, at times repeating the pattern of living she has grown up with.
 
But the story of Field’s acting career is only one strand of her memoir. She shares the most intimate parts of her life which help to illuminate who she is as an actor. I am reminded of her titular role in Norma Rae, when she stomps up onto a table and unites laborers where she works, and it is not difficult to believe that Field gains her power from a very real scene transpiring with her stepfather, one of the most dramatic scenes from the book. Sally is fifteen, both her mother and stepfather, Jocko, are drunk, and he picks a fight with Sally, informing her she’s a smart-ass, that he knows her inside and out, and she denies that he knows anything about her:
“The room turned red, bright blazing red. I rose from where I sat perched on the edge of my childhood, rose up through years of fear, fury, and longing, of confusion and love. I stepped onto the coffee table and there we were again, eye-to-eye, nose-to nose.
 
‘I hate you! YOU’RE the liar! Not ME! And you know NOTHING!’ From my mouth came a voice, but it didn’t belong to me, and from a faraway place I watched as this little person who looked like me stood up until she seemed to tower over this man.
 
‘You don’t know who I am!” This guttural voice, filled with loathing, vomited forth as she peered into his eyes. But it wasme. I was still there, somewhere. And while she stood, I held my breath—for a minute? An hour? And a stunning realization hit me: He was frightened of her. He was frightened of me” (90).
 
Jocko throws Field repeatedly against a glass patio door, but even so she realizes she has won. “Somehow, some part of me that wasn’t afraid, that didn’t care if I was loved, or if I lived or died, had beaten him. He knew it too” (91)
Wow. That page and a half stuns me. I suddenly see, perhaps, (for who knows where it emanates from) the power Field draws from to act, to create the memorable characters that she has for decades—the place inside her where she must retreat again and again, mining emotional truth to create honest and vibrant characters. As I said, Wow. Field’s memoir continues at this pace until the very end, in which she reaches resolution about a very key event from her childhood, one through which the reader can view Sally Field as a whole, integrated person, one who has more than earned what one might call happiness. 

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-37  New Hampshire
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My Journey of States-36  Vermont

1/9/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
​The health of the people is of supreme importance. All measures looking to their protection against the spread of contagious diseases and to the increase of our sanitary knowledge for such purposes deserve attention of Congress.
Chester A. Arthur
Born October 5, 1829
Fairfield, Vermont
Died November 18, 1886
Washington DC
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C. Arthur
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the thirty-sixth post of fifty.

Vermont (2003)

In 2003, I applied for entrance into the distinguished Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. In addition to filling out a long form I was asked to include a writing sample. I secured airfare and accommodations immediately to lock in good prices for Ken and myself. Months later, I received the news that I had not been accepted. Ken and I decided to make a vacation of it and go anyway. After all, we were staying in nearby Middlebury, not on the Bread Loaf campus itself. The conference opened its doors each evening to the public for literary events, and we attended a reading by Charles Baxter and one by Sigrid Nunez. I continued to apply to the conference, and I was ultimately accepted in 2006 but turned it down because of ill health. At any rate, back to 2003, Ken and I enjoyed traveling throughout the state of Vermont, gazing upon verdant farmland, the White Mountains thick with hardwoods. It would be, for us, a grand place to live . . . for about five months out of the year.
 
During our twelve-day visit we took a shoreline cruise on Lake Champlain, spent time at Fort Ticonderoga and Fort St. Frédéric, both located over the border in New York, and visited Justin Smith Morrill State Historic Site in Strafford, Shelburne Museum, the state house in Montpelier, and the Bennington Museum. I wish the visits I made to every state could be this leisurely and comprehensive.
​
Vermont is the fourteenth state and celebrated its bicentennial in 1991.

Historical Postcards & Trunk Decals

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas                13. New Jersey     25. Michigan
2-Oklahoma        14. Delaware         26. Wisconsin
3-Texas                   15. New York        27. Minnesota
​4-Louisiana         16. Connecticut     28. Iowa
5-Missouri           17. Colorado         29. Hawaii
6-Illinois               18. Arkansas        30. Georgia
7-Indiana              19. California       31. S. Carolina
8-Ohio                   20. Florida             32. N. Carolina
9-Pennsylvania    21. Mississippi    33. Alabama
10-West VA        22. New Mexico     34. Kentucky
11-Maryland       23. Tennessee      35. Massachusetts
12. Virginia          24. Arizona
NEXT TIME: My Book World, Sally Field's Memoir, In Pieces
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My Journey of States-35  Massachusetts

1/2/2019

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A WRITER'S WIT
​If we cannot now end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Born May 29, 1917
Brookline, Massachusetts
Died November 22, 1963
Dallas, Texas
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JFK
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the thirty-fifth post of fifty.

MASSACHUSETTS (2003, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2012, 2018)

The first trip that Ken and I made during our retirement was to Massachusetts, in 2003 (see photos above), and thereafter we made at least five more visits. Most often we stayed with a friend who lived in Northampton. She taught at the University of Massachusetts  in Amherst, and commuted the eleven-mile jaunt. Most often we went in autumn, and the changing trees served as a dramatic backdrop to whatever we chose to do, whether it was to daytrip over to Pittsfield to tour author Edith Wharton’s home, The Mount (three times), or the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge. We saw Williams College in Williamstown, Historic Deerfield and Deerfield Academy, the rock at Plymouth, where he lunched on authentic New England clam chowder. And finally, we visited Boston in 2018 on a cool, clammy day in October that made for oddly beautiful photographs. 
 
Massachusetts was the sixth state to be admitted to the union in 1788. 

Historical Postcards & Trunk Decals

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas                13. New Jersey     25. Michigan     
2-Oklahoma        14. Delaware         26. Wisconsin
3-Texas                   15. New York        27. Minnesota
​4-Louisiana         16. Connecticut     28. Iowa
5-Missouri           17. Colorado         29. Hawaii
6-Illinois               18. Arkansas        30. Georgia
7-Indiana              19. California       31. S. Carolina
8-Ohio                   20. Florida             32. N. Carolina
9-Pennsylvania    21. Mississippi    33. Alabama
10-West VA        22. New Mexico     34. Kentucky
11-Maryland       23. Tennessee
12. Virginia          24. Arizona
LOOK FOR My Book World in Future Posts
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My Journey of States-34  Kentucky

12/19/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
​We in the press have a special role since there is no other institution in our society that can hold the President accountable. I do believe that our democracy can endure and prevail only if the American people are informed.
Helen Thomas
Born August 4, 1920 Winchester, KY
Died July 20, 2013 Washington, DC
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H. Thomas
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the thirty-fourth post of fifty.

Kentucky (1994)

One of the hottest drives Ken and I ever made was in 1994, when we ventured across Indiana into Kentucky to visit with friends I’d taught with at one of my schools. They were (and are) a fun couple. They lived in a rather rustic setting, and we enjoyed the lush scenery on our drive through the state. I believe we drank great quantities of Kentucky bourbon.

Kentucky is the fifteenth state and celebrated its bicenquinquagenary in 2017.

Historical Postcards & Trunk Decals

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas                13. New Jersey     25. Michigan
2-Oklahoma        14. Delaware         26. Wisconsin
3-Texas                   15. New York        27. Minnesota
​4-Louisiana         16. Connecticut     28. Iowa
5-Missouri           17. Colorado         29. Hawaii
6-Illinois               18. Arkansas        30. Georgia
7-Indiana              19. California       31. S. Carolina
8-Ohio                   20. Florida             32. N. Carolina
9-Pennsylvania    21. Mississippi    33. Alabama
10-West VA        22. New Mexico
11-Maryland       23. Tennessee
12. Virginia          24. Arizona
HAPPY HOLIDAYS! No more posts until January 2, 2019
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My Journey of States-33  Alabama

12/12/2018

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A WRITER'S WIT
​We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising. I still believe that one can learn to play the piano by mail and that mud will give you a perfect complexion.
Zelda Fitzgerald
Born July 24, 1900
Montgomery, Alabama
Died March 10, 1948
Ashville, North Carolina
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MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the thirty-third post of fifty.

Alabama (1994)

Ken and I stayed in Tuscaloosa on one of our sojourns to Myrtle Beach. In 1981, I wrote a fan letter to author Lonnie Coleman, who had enchanted me with his Beulah Land and Mark, a novel about a young gay man at the University of Alabama in the 1930s. How difficult it must have been to write about such a situation. I remember bursting into tears at the end of Mark. That alone was the reason for writing Coleman in October of 1981: I've never written a fan letter to an author before, and I'm not sure that's what this is. Nevertheless, I was compelled to tell you how much I enjoyed your recent novel, Mark. I was gratified when he wrote back: 
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For a state that holds such a horrible reputation for civil rights, it also boasts quite a list of literary figures. Entire novels have been written about the anguished relationships between slaves and their so-called owners, perhaps attempting to atone.

​Alabama is the nation’s twenty-second state and celebrates its bicentennial in 2019.

Historical Postcards & Trunk Decals

If you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link:
1-Kansas                13. New Jersey     25. Michigan
2-Oklahoma        14. Delaware         26. Wisconsin
3-Texas                   15. New York        27. Minnesota
​4-Louisiana         16. Connecticut     28. Iowa
5-Missouri           17. Colorado         29. Hawaii
6-Illinois               18. Arkansas        30. Georgia
7-Indiana              19. California       31. S. Carolina
8-Ohio                   20. Florida             32. N. Carolina
9-Pennsylvania    21. Mississippi
10-West VA        22. New Mexico
11-Maryland       23. Tennessee
12. Virginia          24. Arizona
NEXT TIME: My Book World, White Rage by Carol Anderson
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